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The Pythagoreans were also a group said to have conquered death. Pythagoreanism was founded by Pythagoras, a figure who lived somewhere between 750-500 BCE in Samos, an Island off the coast of Turkey, and then in Croton, a Greek colony in Calabria. Though he is the author of the famous theorem about the right triangle, little is known of Pythagoras himself; those who followed his teachings were encouraged to become mystics, not mathematicians. Pythagoreans developed an advanced religious doctrine combining theories of music, mathematics, diet, and ascetic practices. They too believed in the reincarnation and transmigration of souls and are often cited as the source of the Platonic doctrines. In Late Antiquity reports of Orphism and Pythagoreanism tend to coalesce. Scholars speak of the phenomenon as Neo-Pythagoreanism.

Stoics and Epicureans

MANY PHILOSOPHERS, and particularly the Epicureans, eschewed the doctrines of immortality preached by the Orphics and Pythagoreans. Epicurus based his philosophy on the atomic theory of Democritus. There was only one substance in the universe, matter, which was composed of unbreakable primal units-atoms. The opposite of matter was the void, vacuum. This corresponds with modern physics in a remarkable way, but the effects of the doctrine for the Greeks were religious and ethical.

“Void” is literally asomatos, or incorporeal. The soul was an atomic body or it was nothing, which even fits the Homeric evidence as well as any other theory does. It cannot be incorporeal, says Epicurus, in obvious direct contradiction to Plato.36 The direct consequence of such a theory is that the person’s body and soul both, like all other material bodies, are destroyed with death. So Epicurus could deny the Homeric depiction of the afterlife as truth but give it credence as an allegory. The same evaluation met any doctrine of immortality of the soul preached by Platonists. He suggests that the fear of death is fruitless:

The most terrifying of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist, death is not present. But when death is present, then we do not exist. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, since concerning the former it does not exist, and concerning the latter, they no longer exist (10.125)

Thus, the whole Epicurean tradition eschewed immortality. Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean, could comfort his followers by repeating that “death is nothing to us”:37

Therefore death is nothing to us, it matters not one bit, since the nature of souls (or minds, animi) is understood to be mortal; and as in time past we felt no distress … so, when we shall no longer be … nothing at all will be able to happen to us…. (de rerum natura, 3.830)

Although the notion of retribution was not prominent in Greek thought, evidently it had a following, enough for Lucretius to take the time to dispute it. There is no punishment after death, he says, in good Epicurean fashion, because there is no afterlife at all. We are not sentient beings after death, since we do not exist at all; therefore, we cannot suffer or be punished. He further says that funerary practice is absurd. There is no reason to take care of the corpse, he says, since there is no sensory perception of it. It does not matter whether it is buried or not. Or, running the argument the other way around: were there any “consciousness” left in the corpse, it would feel just as bad by being roasted on a pyre or being suffocated with burial or being embalmed with pitch. He obviously ignores the health problems avoided by disposing of the dead. What he was interested in was notoriety for the extremity of his opinion in a world that universally felt denial of funeral rites to be an unconscionable insult and humiliation both to the grieving family and the departed.

In the same vein, Cicero makes his character Scipio affirm: sic habeto non esse te mortalem sed corpus hoc—“hold this to be true, not you are mortal but [you are] this body” (de re publica, 6, 26). Seneca too was simply